Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Alexandre Tiriac has received a 2026 McKnight Scholar Award to expand his research on brain development.
Started in 1977 by the McKnight Foundation, the McKnight Scholar Awards are granted to early-career scientists who have demonstrated a commitment to neuroscience. The highly completive award provides each recipient $75,000 per year for three years.
“Winning this award means the world to me,” Tiriac said. “It serves as an exciting validation from the broader scientific community that the developmental questions my lab is passionate about truly matter. I am incredibly eager to join the McKnight community and attend the annual conference. I am convinced that sharing ideas and discussing neuroscience with other McKnight fellows will act as a catalyst, enhancing the rigor of our research and starting collaborations.”
Tiriac’s research will examine if bodily twitches during the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stage act as a self-calibration mechanism that helps the brain continuously learn the structure and capabilities of its own body. His lab will test whether twitches are required for building the neural maps responsible for sensing body position and whether twitch patterns predict the emergence of motor milestones during development. He will also investigate whether adult motor learning reshapes subsequent twitching, revealing a lifelong bidirectional loop between sleep and movement.
“We are tackling the fundamental question of why we twitch when we sleep, looking at it through multiple angles,” Tiriac said. “First, from a sensory development perspective, we are testing whether these sleep twitches are critical for developing proprioception, which is the sense that allows us to know where our limbs are in space. Second, we want to determine if these movements are essential for reaching major motor milestones during early development, and whether they serve a similar purpose in helping adults learn entirely new motor skills.”
Tiriac has always been fascinated by brain development and understanding the mechanisms that form this complex organ that can drive our everyday behaviors. His focus on sleep twitches began in graduate school, where he started working toward his goal of discovering how they affect brain development.
His findings could reveal the vital mechanism the brain uses to continuously map and keep track of a rapidly growing body, potentially shedding light on why infants spend much of their early life asleep. The research could also offer deeper insights into other species, as all animals twitch during sleep.
“I am tremendously grateful to the McKnight Foundation for supporting this work that I have been passionate about pursuing since my graduate student days,” Tiriac said. “I also want to share this honor with the incredibly talented members of my lab at Vanderbilt who make doing science an absolute joy every day. And lastly, I want to add that I would not be able to do what I do without my past mentors who nurtured my passion for developmental neuroscience and trained me to be a rigorous researcher. I think about their impact all the time, and I strive to pass it forward to my students.”